Out of the Warner vault: ‘Eye of the Devil’
In recent years, Warner Home Video has been pulling oddities off the shelf — titles that would not warrant a full-scale commercial release — and making them available through the Warner Archive...
View ArticleThe perfect gift for your ‘Scarface’-crazed drug dealer
If you have $999.99 burning a hole in your pocket — and hang out with any of the cult followers of the 1983 Brian DePalma film “Scarface” — have I got a one-of-a-kind gift for you! To celebrate the...
View Article‘Gossip’: three New York City women moving through time
There’s something deeply satisfying about stories that allow us to follow a small group of friends over many years — watching careers rise and fall, personal lives fit together or fly to pieces. Trios...
View Article‘Political Animals’: the Clintons in a cracked mirror
The new six part USA series “Political Animals” is likely to raise more than a few hackles because of its tasteless but very gripping reimagining of the Clintons and the contemporary political scene. I...
View ArticleBad movies we love: ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’
Although it was first conceived as a semi-legitimate sequel to the 1967 hit “Valley of the Dolls,” the Russ Meyer-Roger Ebert film “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” was considered so tawdry in 1970 that...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: Susan Hayward & Dean Martin in ‘Ada’
Never what you would call a subtle actress, Susan Hayward had an energy and charisma that served her well for more than 30 years on screen. Hayward always seemed to be aware of the goofiness just under...
View ArticleBad movies we love: ‘The Fan’
From Dec. 31, 2009 – Novelist and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Lisa Scottoline wrote a funny piece for the paper last week on deciding to forget about New Year’s resolutions in favor of making a...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: 1960s soap ‘Where Love Has Gone’
“50 Shades of Grey” author E.L. James has nothing on the late great Harold Robbins when it comes to bestselling smut. Robbins too was accused of peddling porn disguised as popular fiction and had his...
View ArticleFollowing three of the women who worked for those ‘Mad Men’
The hit AMC series, “Mad Men,” which returns for its fifth season Sunday night, has gotten a lot of mileage out of its time-travel aspect of taking the viewer back to Manhattan office life of the early...
View Article‘A Hundred Summers’: a beach book with historical heft
The notion of the “beach book” has been with us as long as people have been taking seaside summer vacations. For some folks, the term suggests a lighter, even trashy book that they might not read when...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: ‘The Carpetbaggers’
Harold Robbins’ novel “The Carpetbaggers” was considered so shocking when it was published in 1961 that it even prompted a New York Times reviewer to foam at the mouth. “It was not quite proper to have...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: ‘The Swarm’
I was happy to see that the hilarious Manhattan gender illusionist Hedda Lettuce recently screened the 1978 disaster movie “The Swarm” as part of her regular Thursday night cult classics series at the...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: the goofy & melancholy ‘Blood Beach’
There are bad movies we watch more than once because they are so over-the-top awful (“Valley of the Dolls”) or that capture a slice of society rarely seen on screen (the early 1980s Broadway of “The...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: ‘Staying Alive’ — Broadway hell
Theater fans bitched about the “unreality” of NBC’s 2012 Broadway drama “Smash” and now they’re complaining about the ludicrous depiction of the life of a New York stage actress in the new Kirstie...
View Article#FridayReads ‘I Said Yes to Everything’ by Lee Grant
Some of the gossipy stuff in the new Lee Grant memoir has already been skimmed off in various newspaper columns and on entertainment websites — an affair with Warren Beatty while making “Shampoo,” a...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: the goofy & melancholy ‘Blood Beach’
There are bad movies we watch more than once because they are so over-the-top awful (“Valley of the Dolls”) or that capture a slice of society rarely seen on screen (the early 1980s Broadway of “The...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: ‘Once is Not Enough’
The headline here is a tad deceptive. “Once is Not Enough” is unquestionably bad, but “love” is the wrong word for my feelings about this 1975 Paramount adaptation of the Jacqueline Susann bestseller....
View ArticleFollowing three of the women who worked for those ‘Mad Men’
The hit AMC series, “Mad Men,” which returns for its sixth season Sunday night, has gotten a lot of mileage out of its time-travel aspect of taking the viewer back to Manhattan office life of the early...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: Susan Hayward in ‘Ada’
Never what you would call a subtle actress, Susan Hayward had an energy and charisma that served her well for more than 30 years on screen. Hayward always seemed to be aware of the goofiness just under...
View ArticleFollowing three of the women who worked for those ‘Mad Men’
The hit AMC series, “Mad Men,” which returns for its sixth season Sunday night, has gotten a lot of mileage out of its time-travel aspect of taking the viewer back to Manhattan office life of the early...
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